Several accidents involving fire-arms are reported as occurring daily, either with small playful children, depressive individuals, or psychopaths.
Safety devices have been proposed in the art to prevent introduction of a cartridge or bullet into the firing chamber of the gun; for example, Canadian patent No. 934,198, issued Sept. 25, 1975 to Lennart Johansson, Sven Andersson, and Jan Eliasson. In this patent, the safety device 17-18 is designed to lock the gun against use thereof, by engagement of the metal body 17 of the device into the conventional counterbore 13 of the fire-arm. This device is not designed for use with an automatic of semi-automatic rifle or gun.
Moreover, as clearly stated at page 1, lines 7-11 of Johansson et al, the safety device is in such engagement with the vital parts of thereby-locked fire-arm that a forcible removal of the safety device, such as by breaking it open or tearing it off, would damage the fire-arm in such a manner that the fire-arm cannot be used thereafter.
Fire-arms are precisely-machined pieces of equipment and damages incurred by same generally means a high repair cost. It is believed that the damaging of the fire-arm is not in itself the main deterrent to its unauthorized use, although, of course, it will prevent that use. It is rather believed that, for the great majority of cases, when unauthorized use of a fire-arm is envisioned by an individual, a simple but efficient locking device that will, prevent engagement of a cartridge or bullet into the firing chamber without damage being done to the vital parts of the gun upon forcible disengagement thereof, will be just as good a deterrent, provided the level of skill and time required to render inoperative the safety locking device is high.
Unauthorized activities involving the use of fire-arms are normally the result of a psychological propess (either playfulness or anger) that follows a temporary or cyclical pattern, whereby these individuals would be discouraged to attempt to use the gun. It is thus believed that destruction of the gun is not a prerequisite.